On 2 June, in her last appearance at the Dispatch Box as Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith MP unexpectedly announced a major change in government policy on immigration.
“Requiring migrants to earn citizenship will, for the first time, meaning there will be no automatic link between coming to the UK to work or study and then settling here permanently".
Immigrants currently seem to think that when they have the right to come to work in Britain they then assume an almost automatic right to settle here.
"Building Britain’s Future", says: “we will now require newcomers to earn the right to stay, extending the Points Based System to probationary citizenship and controlling the number of people getting settlement.”
Unfortunately, this alone will not be nearly enough to stop immigration adding 7 million to our population in the next twenty years.
To stop the population hitting 70 million, net immigration must be reduced to 50,000 a year from the present level of 237,000. The Government’s current policies would reduce immigration to about 223,000.
The Conservatives are relying on a cap on work permits but have not yet said what it will be. However, even if they go back to the level of work permits of the early 1990s, their policy would only reduce net immigration to about 172,000.
Since 1997, looking at people of working age, all jobs created in the private sector have been taken up by foreign born workers. The number of UK born workers in the private sector actually fell by nearly 90,000 between the first quarter of 1997 and the first quarter of 2009. A third of new public sector jobs also went to non-UK born workers.
New jobs figures show that unemployment is hitting British born workers harder than those born overseas. In Q1 2008 – Q1 2009, the number of UK born people in employment fell by 451,000 and the number of non-UK born people in work rose by 129,000.
The number of non-UK born people in employment has risen by more than 50 per cent in the last six years, from 2.5 million in Q1 2003 to 3.8 million in Q1 2009.
The recent report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission on migration and social housing needs to be set in the context of official figures which show that the Government has consistently revised upwards its projection for the number of new households that there will be in England in 2021. The projected figure will rise from 21.52 million (2006) to 25.44 million in 2021 – that is four million in 15 years.
This means one new household will be formed every two minutes.
According to Government forecasts, 70% of the population increase up to 2031 will be due to immigration.
In addition, the largest single reason for household formation is immigration, which will account for almost 40% of all new households in England, equivalent to a new household every five minutes for future immigrants.
92 per cent of immigration has been to England, twenty times more than went to Scotland, according to new research based on official statistics. The Government’s figures also revealed that 95 per cent of projected population growth will be in England.
England absorbed some 20 times more international migrants than Scotland, even though the population of England is only ten times larger than Scotland. England took 11 times more than Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland combined, even though its population is only five times bigger.
Following the European elections on 4 June, at which two BNP MEPs were elected to the European Parliament for the first time, Migrationwatch commissioned a YouGov poll on behalf of the Cross Party Group. The poll showed that 35 per cent of voters listed immigration as an issue that most influenced their decision, above the NHS, crime, education and the environment.
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